Episode Notes Hi there. Ducky Obrien chilling like a fruit drop in a tin can. Today we go over the two most important questions in life: 1. Perception? 2. Something about DMT Show Notes Link: https://duckyobrien.com/2020/05/16/the-importance-of-perceived-value/ Show Notes Short: It's more important what people think of your content rather than the actual quality of your content. This means that marketing your content is more important to growth than actually creating content. Networking with other content creators is the fastest and most reliable path for growth. Show Notes Long: I don’t know about you but when I go shopping online, at a retailer such as Amazon, the first thing I check to help me make my purchasing decisions are the customer reviews. I’m sure most people probably do the same thing and check for the item with the most positive reviews for any product before making a purchase. This behavior deals with the concept known as perceived value. Perceived value is the customer’s evaluation of the value and ability of the product or service to meet their needs compared to other similar products or services. And in the present world where online shopping is prevalent, a customer is not able to observe the product in person for themselves. This in turn, lead to the growth of customer reviews having a huge influence on the perceived value of the product, especially for products from companies with weaker brand recognition. If you don’t believe me, this shift in purchases having a heavy reliance on customer reviews have created the problem of a massive flood of fake reviews from less then scrupulous companies taking advantage of this purchasing behavior. Fake reviews have become such a problem that sites like Fakespot are solely dedicated to determining the reliability of reviews. I won’t get into the details about how this works but generally speaking it analyzes the reviews to see if there are accounts spamming similar products from related companies and analyzing the text of the reviews to see if they are generated from bots. A surprising number of products listed on Amazon right now, that are best sellers, are products with fake reviews. So how does this concept tie in with the world of content creation? Content is a product. And the people who consume the content are your customers. Perceived value is especially important because without it, there is no reason for someone to check out your content over someone else’s. The world of content creation is very competitive because the barrier to entry is very low. Anyone with a computer or even a smart phone, an internet connection, some software, and an idea can create content for any of the existing platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, etc. Since these platforms are so saturated with content creators, people consuming content rely on perceived value to choose the creators they will want to support. I want take an aside here to note that some content creation “gurus” have this absurd notion that there is unlimited potential growth for every single content creator. This is a flat out lie. Just as people have limited incomes and they cannot purchase everything they want to, people also have limited time and cannot consume all the content they would like to, whether it be games, movies, music, books, etc. What this boils down to, is the fact that your content needs to have more perceived value over someone else’s for you to experience growth. This begs the question then, how do you increase the perceived value of your content? The sad reality is that perceived value is not necessarily tied to the actual value of your content. The old adage of “make quality content” has absolutely no correlation to growth. There are so many content creators out there, making content with either no originality and blatantly copying other people’s ideas or trends, poorly produced, lacking any artistic or academic value, and etc. that have a massive following. Whereas incredibly talented creators with well thought out, original, and well produced content are constantly passed over. This is due to the criteria that people have come to use to determine the perceived value of content. The bad news is that it is very similar to the criteria most people use to judge the perceived value of a product sold online, positive reviews. By positive reviews, I simply mean the number of followers, subscribers, views, likes, comments, favorites, etc. that you have for your content on that specific platform. This is more true than you realize. Many of the larger streamers on Twitch are actually not that great at playing games. They don’t really offer more insight, or a higher level of skill than most other streamers. There is no academic value whatsoever as watching these people will not make you better at playing the games. So then people might argue that they offer more entertainment or are more engaging than other streamers. This is not even true as well. You ...
